Wanted! (8 page)

She tried to imagine herself going back to that high school, or any high school, under such a cloud.

Cloud?

Suspicion of killing your own father was not a cloud.

It was a forty-foot brick wall with rolls of slice wire on top.

It was prison.

The boys disappeared down the corridor and Alice followed. She hoped they were headed for an open lab, rows of cubicles each with keyboard and screen. When the boys clattered up to the second floor, so did Alice.

She had chills. The place was overly air-conditioned. At the top of the stairs was a lounge, walls lined with vending machines, drinking fountains, padded black vinyl benches…and phones.

Was Mommy by the phone? Was she holding the phone book with its quilted cover? Playing with the china cat which held pencils? Sitting on the slipper chair with its pattern of white geese, and its pillow of stuffed sheep? Was Mommy praying Alice would call again?

What about Grandma and Grandpa, in Florida in their retirement home? Did they know yet?

Her grandparents adored Alice. Alice adored them.

Alice could possibly get to Florida on her credit card.

But—hide out in Grandma’s spare bedroom? Abandon her life? Leave her friends and classes? Her wardrobe and her cat?

She wanted desperately to hear her mother’s voice. To hear Mommy say, No, no, darling, it was all a terrible mistake, Daddy is fine, he’s been out looking for you, and—

She seized the nearest phone, like a trapeze artist seizing the approaching swing. She called her mother.

A strange voice answered. A voice she had absolutely never heard before. A slightly harsh and loud woman’s voice. “Robie residence,” it said. Alice froze, trying to imagine who it could be, where her mother was.

After the tiny pause, the woman said in a slow, careful voice, “Alice? Your mother is lying down, Alice.”

The woman left little spaces between each sentence to encourage Alice to speak. “I’ll go ask her to come to the phone, Alice.”

“Who is this?” said Alice.

“This is Detective Burke, Alice.”

This is how criminals get caught, thought Alice. They call their mothers.

“Your mother is desperately worried about you, Alice.”

Alice hung up, as gently as if she were replacing crystal on a shelf.

Police were between Alice and her mother. Alice could not picture them among the plump quilted pillows, the baskets full of potpourri, and the rows of wooden kitty cats along the windowsills.

Alice leaned against the wall phone, bursting with anger and grief. Police! Invading both Alice’s homes, answering Alice’s phone, reading Alice’s E-mail, possibly—no, definitely—squirreling through Alice’s bedroom and possessions and privacy.

She had to call someone. She had to talk.

She thought of Kelsey, of Laura and Cindy and Mardee and Emma. What if one of their mothers answered the phone?
Hi, Mrs. Schmidt, it’s Alice Robie; can I speak to Laura please?
And it would be,
Alice, aren’t the police looking for you? We don’t let Laura be friends with girls suspected of murder.

Running away meant you left your friends someplace else.

I shouldn’t have run, she thought.

But running had come so naturally. And having started, she was not willing to stop.

She thought of perfect Paul in high school, but he didn’t know her and she didn’t know how to spell his last name. He had one of those very complex names nobody could spell, so nobody used it. They didn’t call him Paul Chmielewskiwicz or whatever it was; they called him Paul Chem. She wasn’t going to find his number in a phone book that way.

Alice knew who to call. The number on her father’s Caller ID display. The number where—

Where he was murdered? thought Alice.

She believed it now, and yet she could not believe it at all. Would she have to see her dead father to believe it? She never wanted to see him anything except laughing and glad to have her around. If they offered her a chance to see him dead, she would refuse.

But how else would she know if it was true?

The telephones were entirely exposed, nothing but a few inches of Plexiglas separating one from another. Alice hoped that the people using the other phones were too pleased with the sound of their own voices to listen in on Alice.

It was time to find out where her father had been. She needed to know who answered the phone at 399-8789.

She rang up the zillion digits required for a credit card call. Her hands hurt just tapping the buttons. Sometimes Grandma could not do crossword puzzles because arthritis made holding the pencil difficult and now Alice knew how it felt; it felt cold and cruel and helpless. You didn’t have to be seventy. You could be fifteen and alone.

The phone rang once. A quick masculine voice said, “Yes?”

One syllable. One single ordinary syllable that everybody in America used every day, and Alice had to identify the speaker from that.

I can’t, she thought. I don’t know who this is, and I don’t know if it’s one of the voices in the condo. Am I speaking to my father’s killer?
Who is on the phone with me?

She said, “This is Alice.”

There was a gasp.

Alice stood very still.

The person on the other end hung up.

Alice’s hand did not let go of the phone, but remained curled around the receiver. She did not know who this man was,
but he knew who she was.

Under the circumstances, it seemed to Alice that any grown-up would have questions for her. Any grown-up would try to keep her on the phone, try to locate her, try to get answers, and bring her in.

Any grown-up except the man who already had the answers.

She got her hand loose. She gave it a piece of book bag to clutch instead and she turned herself around and walked away from the phones. A sign poking off the top of a chrome stand said:

LAB OPEN
24
HOURS

ALL STUDENTS MUST PRESENT ID

But there was nobody checking IDs and she simply walked in and nobody looked up, because people using computers never look up, and Alice circled the room, found a carrel, sat down, flicked on the computer, and there they were, friendly little icons willing to work for her whether she was accused of murder or not.

She took out her father’s disk, and she saw his hands, his long thick fingers, strong and clever fingers, taking this disk, entering information on it, possibly dying for it.

She let herself slide into a daydream in which Daddy had met her for ice cream after all, and he said to her, “I’m so proud! You drove all this way without any problems? In the toughest car on earth to drive? Not a scratch on it? Wonderland, you’ve saved my life.”

But I didn’t save his life, she thought, falling out of the dream.

He’s not going to kiss me eleven times on the hair, and he’s not going to play caveman and yank my hair and pretend to drag me over for ice cream.

Daddy called her Wonderland because he said Alice had made his life a Wonderland, and he was the luckiest guy on earth; must have been magic and Cheshire cats that gave him such a perfect daughter.

She was pretty sure that your college ID number was your social security number, and if you didn’t type that in, you couldn’t boot up. Even if she knew her social security number by heart, which she didn’t, she wasn’t enrolled here and her number wouldn’t accomplish anything. She scanned the busy room, waiting for somebody to get up and forget to shut down the computer.

The room was divided among PCs, Macs, and a dedicated row for Internet use only. The Internet.

She thought: I know the passwords. I can read my mother’s E-mail. I can read what I supposedly sent: the message in which I supposedly confessed to killing my own father.

M
OM I DON’T KNOW WHAT
happened. We got into an argument and we yelled and you know how much i hate yelling and he was asying bad things about you and you know i cant stand when you 2 say bad things sabout ech other and i kept saying stop sotp stop and he didn’t and the fight went on and i hit him. mom its awful it really happenede i hit him and i hit him again and i know i have to call 911 but i hid uhndr the car ihstead but i couldn’t get away from the blood mommy come get me please come get me ally

Of course she believed it, thought Alice.
I
believe it. It’s perfect. Who wrote that? I don’t use capital letters when I write E-mail, I don’t start with Dear and I don’t end with Love, and I say Mom, except when I’m really upset or angry and then I say Mommy. She’s the only person who ever called me Ally. I’m an Alice, sort of prim and careful.

Well, she knew now how her father died. He’d been hit. Over and over. There was a lot of blood.

Alice shuddered, and when she fought off the tears, she was not sure whether they’d have been for Daddy or herself. Or even her mother.

How did they think little Alice had done this to her very big father?

There must have been a frenzy in it, a rage, and they must have assumed her father wasn’t ready, or had his back turned, or didn’t take it seriously.

And they would be right. Only frenzy would make the killer say, “I killed him good,” so that Alice could hear. And Dad had
not
taken it seriously, or wasn’t ready, or had his back turned.

Suppose Mom read that the moment it came in. This was likely, because Alice and Mom usually E-mailed if they weren’t going to see each other that night, and Alice was staying at Dad’s. Once she read that, of course she’d have called the police! “Go rescue my daughter! Get there fast! And save Marc.”

Mom would have wanted sirens and speed. Mom would have said to herself, it can’t be that bad! It can’t be!

Mom would have left work, too, rushing, taking
left
turns on red, never mind right, using her horn like a private siren—the way Dad would have loved to drive but Mom would have never dreamed of driving.

The police had been on the way while Alice was bolting in the Corvette; they must have been racing in the front door just as she was racing through the city.

No.

They didn’t race in.

Because Alice had thrown the dead-bolt from the inside and closed the garage door. Mom didn’t have keys. Who had let them in? Or had they broken down the door?

Dad would have loved that. He had always wanted drama and quick crazy action. Police to the rescue, smashing in the door!

The girl next to Alice was staring at her. Alice was panting: tiny quick little huffs to match an unbelievably quick pulse and an unbelievably bad headache, throbbing and grating with shock.

Alice tried to sit very still. If she could quiet down the leaping ions and screaming synapses of her brain, maybe she could think again.

This terrible confession could probably be used in court. It was so real. Assuming the killer was bright enough to use gloves—and he seemed more than intelligent enough—there would be no fingerprints on that computer but hers and Dad’s.

How could Alice combat that confession?

How could she convince people that No, somebody else wrote that?

And there would be other stuff…she had scrambled under the car. That rough cement would have scraped off hair, and her terrified fingers pressing down might have found the only grease spots and left perfect prints there, too. And her clothing—the dress that had scraped against the underside of the Corvette was wadded up in the bathroom.

Alice closed the screen, throwing the mouse arrow around until she was out of there, slamming little electronic doors against this nightmare.

Alice stood up stiffly, as a whole group of exhausted, pale girls agreed that this was enough already and gathered their books and notebooks and trudged out of the lab. Sure enough, two had neglected to turn off their terminals.

Alice took a seat, tilted her seat back and looked down the row of college kids.

A gum chewer: jaw barely moving, but moving steadily, unbreaking.

A waist rotater: a girl hoping to find the right word by swaying.

A hair patter: a guy hoping the solution would come if his hair were neater.

A hummer of tiresome tunes, who was about to get socked by the hair patter.

And Alice. Wanted for murder.

She could think of no actual solution for anything whatsoever, but she did have Dad’s disk, she could read it. She clung to the belief that on that disk would be what she needed: knowledge, a way out, safety.

She popped the disk into the slot. Moved the mouse. Double clicked.

There was only one file.

She opened it. The fingernails made her crazy. They stuck out far enough so that she hit the wrong keys, or two at a time.

Alice had been expecting scientific material from some company that Dad was involved with at Austin & Scote. Codes and data. Dollars and bank account numbers. Details of some scam or fraud. Maybe even plans to assassinate somebody.

But what she found was her father’s autobiography. He was writing about his childhood, and he had started with his own birth. She read several paragraphs. He wrote about the brother Alice had never met, because Uncle Rob died long before Alice was born.

Alice’s nerves doubled up on her. She could barely read. The kids in her row were nothing: She was probably waist rotating, hair patting, and humming all at once. But she couldn’t tell. That was the definition of losing your mind: when you couldn’t tell anymore.

Alice’s father wrote: We were not twins. We just thought of ourselves that way. My brother Robert Robie was one year and one month older than I was. Kid, he called me. Or Little Guy. Actually I was taller and heavier. I loved fighting. I was born with fists. I got into wrestling, but my real love was boxing. It was the ultimate challenge: one other guy, one other set of fists. After they found out about it, our parents wouldn’t let me box; they were afraid of brain damage. They did let me take self-defense stuff, various Asian disciplines, and those were okay, but I never fell in love the way I did with boxing.

Rob never cared about his body the way I cared about mine.